The Month Wanting To Help Wasn't Enough

Four years in a rented room near the industrial park, and the suitcase he arrived with still stands in the corner, never once put away. Every month, when the day came, he sent money home to his mother — as steady as the wall calendar with its rows and rows of squares circled in red. This month the factory cut the overtime shifts. He sat down, opened his notebook, and started working it out.

The page filled with crossings-out. Add here, take from there, cross it out, start again. At some point he set the pen down and understood there was no arithmetic that solved this. It wasn't that he hadn't tried hard enough, and it wasn't that he'd forgotten. The wanting he had in abundance. It was the ability that didn't reach. That's the hardest kind to say out loud, because it isn't anyone's fault to fix.

In the end he sent the message. Then sat there afraid of upsetting her. She replied in exactly five minutes: it's fine if it's hard this month, look after yourself first. Five minutes — which meant she'd already had the phone in her hand. Which meant that on the other end, she had worked this out a long time ago, and what she was waiting for wasn't the money. It was to know her son was all right.

That night he planned to skip meals to make up the difference. The packet of noodles sat unopened on the stove. Then he pictured her finding out that he'd gone hungry to send money home, and how much that would hurt her. Those four unbroken years, it turned out, were something he'd been holding onto for himself — she had never once asked him to prove anything. He ate the whole bowl of rice. Then went to sleep.

She isn't waiting for you to manage it. She's waiting for you to stop straining.

Some months you can't take care of the people you love, and that says nothing at all about the love — it only says something about that month. So: what are you straining to carry right now, just so nobody back home has to know?